When Snarky Doesn’t Play

So I just had an interesting experience at work.

My team is getting ready for a meetup. In preparation for our gathering, each team member is ordering custom Yeti Ramblers.

We decided to put our team name on one side and whatever custom text each team member wants on the other side. The second print is to make it easy to identify who the bottle belongs to in a sea of swag bottles.

My team, known as Hobbes, has a friendly rivalry with another team in our division, Sparta. In reality, we all get along really well and enjoy helping one another out.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of teasing and one-upmanship displayed in the form of GIFs and memes.

So of course, I thought to further this through my swag bottle. My concept for the design was to use the logical operator ! in my custom print. The bottle should have looked like this:

Essentially, I wanted the bottle to read Hobbes NOT Sparta

When placing the order, I noticed some weird behavior on the website and thought it strange that there was no mention of my custom design in the order summary. But full of faith in Yeti’s web development team, I placed the order anyways.

A couple of days later, after noticing my bottle shipped much faster than my teammates, I asked them what their order confirmations looked like.

It seems that I am being shipped a blank bottle.

Curious as to what happened and how I managed to order the bottle without the design, I went back to the customizer.

Turns out my snark broke their customizer

Feeling a little exasperated that I couldn’t get my custom design to get added to the cart in either Chrome or Firefox, I began to troubleshoot. That’s when it hit.

I thought I had to be mistaken at first. In my mind, there was no way that including the logical operator ! in the design it would break things.

But it did.

As soon as I removed the offending character, the customizer works as expected. A teammate tested and let me know that by adding another character in front of the !, the customizer works as well.

I made a video of running through both design creations:

Consider the lesson learned. Snark doesn’t always play.

Also, anyone have a contact for the dev team at Yeti?

Adventure on.